Leveraging big data analytics in healthcare enhancement: trends, challenges and opportunities

Abstract

Clinical decisions are more promising and evidence-based, hence, big data analytics to assist clinical decision-making has been expressed for a variety of clinical fields. Due to the sheer size and availability of healthcare data, big data analytics has revolutionized this industry and promises us a world of opportunities. It promises us the power of early detection, prediction, prevention, and helps us to improve the quality of life. Researchers and clinicians are working to inhibit big data from having a positive impact on health in the future. Different tools and techniques are being used to analyze, process, accumulate, assimilate, and manage large amount of healthcare data either in structured or unstructured form. In this review, we address the need of big data analytics in healthcare: why and how can it help to improve life?. We present the emerging landscape of big data and analytical techniques in the five sub-disciplines of healthcare, i.e., medical image analysis and imaging informatics, bioinformatics, clinical informatics, public health informatics and medical signal analytics. We present different architectures, advantages and repositories of each discipline that draws an integrated depiction of how distinct healthcare activities are accomplished in the pipeline to facilitate individual patients from multiple perspectives. Finally, the paper ends with the notable applications and challenges in adoption of big data analytics in healthcare.